User:T/CHILDPROTECT

CHILDPROTECT is the stalled effort in various Wikimedia projects to pretend they give a shit about protecting children. The policy is designed to give people a false sense of security about letting their children use and edit Wikipedia and its associated projects, despite the vast stores of porn available on Wikipedia, and Wikimedia Commons in particular. Wikipedia has been getting a lot of bad press about the vast amounts of pornography hosted on the site, and the use of these projects by children, and particularly schools.

It began as WP:Pedophilia, created 27 April 2010 by MZMcBride to instill a false sense of security in parents who let their children surf Wikipedia, by making it seem like they are taking adequate precautions to guarantee children's privacy and keep potential groomers, molesters, pedophiles and seducers off of their encyclopedia.

On July 5, it was later renamed to a less alarming "WP:Child protection". But that's okay because McBride had prepared for the worst and backed up his precious original 'Pedophilia' policy name 6 days prior, July 29, 2010 on Meta.

"In June 2010, WMF Executive Director Sue Gardner was quoted in a news story .. Shortly after this, META:Pedophilia was created on META which attempted to document that policy (WP:CHILDPROTECT already existed here)."

Jana Winter wrote the Fox News article on June 25. "CHILDPROTECT" did not exist at that time. An article existed, but it too was called WP:Pedophilia, just like on Meta. Only on July 5, over a week after the story published Sue's quote, was Wikipedia's policy renamed to childprotect.

March 15: SirFozzie of Wikipedia's ArbCom decides to get involved in the Commons dispute! It's like when Glory was going to use Dawn as The Key to rip down the barriers between dimensions! Naturally, as a well-groomed ArbCom representative, he argues for the people to defer power to a secret cabal:

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For those above who suggest that such blocks be handled publicly, I want you to look at the drama above, and ask yourself.. "Do I want to repeat this every single time something like this happens?". There is no way to "Square the Circle" of handling such requests publicly. I will say I don't know how Commons should handle it (having no equivalent of an ArbCom or something like that to work with the WMF, or to handle such requests privately to look at the situation dispassionately with an eye to the evidence.

What you are proposing is that pædophiles should have their accounts blocked, presumably leading to them creating sockpuppets so that people won't know who they are. A blocking policy is unlikely going to get those users away from Commons; at most, it will lead to pædophiles being more hidden to most users (and thus more dangerous to children). If you do instead care about the protection of children, it would be much more practical if users remain under the same well-known usernames so that people know who they are.

In actuality, children are not banned from editing even if they reveal their age and personal details, and competent molester-wannabes actually interested in hurting them would simply, in reaction to awareness of these rules, simply be subtler and simply be creepy up until they acquire a means to communicate outside of the Wikimedia grounds, at which point the community can deny responsibility for facilitating them.

In order to deal with the issue, the Wikimedia Foundation devised an ingenious four-point plan:

Require anybody who has very unprofessionally revealed their unhealthy interest in raping little kids to get a fresh IP address and a brand new anonymous account so that nobody, especially not the WMF, knows who they are.

To avoid undue hysteria, make a policy that anybody publicly accusing a Wikipedia editor of being a pedophile will be b&. All trace of the allegations will be removed, outside of a special Star Chamber tribunal.

Institute a great purge of Wikimedia Commons' bottomless pr0n archives. Also their topless pr0n archives. This will help make Wikipedia look safe for kids to use in school and play, so they can keep uploading those cell phone pictures of themselves standing in bathing suits in their backyards tagged with date, time, and GPS accurate to within 10 feet.

The only minor problem is that the plan is implemented like any other policy on Wikipedia, namely, by having admins run around in circles screaming at each other based on personal agendas and feuds. "You violated civility rules by calling me uncivil!" "No, you violated civility rules by saying that when I called you uncivil it was a violation of civility rules when it clearly isn't." There's one public case on Commons, another on Meta, both of which are unaware of the secret evidence studied by ArbCom, which in turn is not privy to the elite insights of the WMF office action; most influential is the debate on Jimbo Wales' talk page by people who don't know anything about any of them. Five hundred screens and four ArbCom cases later people have forgotten what the hell they were arguing over. So far it is by no means clear that all these rules have helped even a single child find safety and comfort in an adult's loving arms.

I don't agree even with a priori banning people who state they have sex with children. As long as someone is doing good work on Commons, I do not care that they are pedophiles, Nazis or serial killers.